PBS: Independent Lens-China


My sleep cycle is all screwed up. So I am wide awake from late night
into the next norning. I sleep most of the day.

Today I chanced into three excellent programs on PBS. The first one
was on Greece's Parthenon. The second was a two hour story with a
China background from Channel Four, Independent Lens, UK. For the
first hour it was quite boring. The story was on a newly graduated
33 year old Chinese freelance scriptwriter in a writer's slump.. His
MO was to watch government approved Western films for plot
inspiration. The one he chose was The Fugitive with Harrison Ford.
His Chinese version plot character Lin Hao sucked. The plot sucked.
The TV producer wouldn't pay him. The first hour showed how the writer
spent his ordinary days in a pretty industrial urban slum type place
he calls home. I have seen enough of those not to care.

The second hour has our writer trying to do on site research by living
out his plot for the fictional hero Lin Hao, a "fugitive" murderer on
the run. That sucked too although it did perk up my interest in
seeing scenes of the railways and smaller towns along the way. And of
course scenes of Beijing where he stayed for a few months. The
inconsistent story line was a bit jarring. Here is an out of work
writer with no visible means of support who first lived alone in a
fairly large and well furnished Guangzhou apartment and is now in
Beijing driving around in a car and visiting a trendy Beijing
nightclub to "find himself."

Anyway the last 40 minutes had him travelling by train to a north
border town (next to Russia) the went by the name Mohe. It was in the
middle of winter and everything was frozen, something I can identify
with since it is minus 29 deg C outside my window with a windchill
factor of - 40 deg. There is nothing out there, two roads, no bus, no
movie theatre, only three small shops. The largest building is a
schoolblock. Now I really perked up. It was a class of 10year olds
thereabouts. They were being taught in English.. The teacher mangled
her English and her students' English was incomprehensible other for
a few words here and there. What is really ineresting is there was
none of the "See Jack jump"., "See Jill going to school" stuff one
comes across in ESL primers. Instead what they had was a textbook
(?) where the teacher said turn to page 41. Oil is necessary to run a
modern economy. Oil is extracted from the ground. The world's
biggest oil procucers are the Middle East, the US... and so on about
global affairs and oil. In English and to 10 year olds? This in a
small bordertown in backward North China? Wow that's awesome.

Hey Mr. Poon. What do they teach junior high school students in
Guangzhou?


.

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